Previews

Empire Earth 2

Spiffy:

It's about time someone gave us a citizen manager!

Iffy:

Just another RTS?

Fresh off its follow up to Dungeon Siege with the Legends of Aranna expansion, Mad Doc Software is now following up on Empire Earth with the appropriately named Empire Earth 2. On the surface, it looks like just another graphics-intensive RTS winding its way through the ages. But there are some new touches.

Take the weather, for instance. Each map will be set in a particular type of terrain which determines the weather cycles. These aren't merely cosmetic. For instance, tropical springs will bring thunderstorms that will ground your aircraft. Desert summers will kick up dust storms to limit unit visibility. Building outposts will give you forecasting powers so you can anticipate bad weather and plan accordingly.

The interface helps tie the battlefield and the resource management together. You can call up a full screen map that gives you access to some innovative control schemes. For instance, there's a citizen manager that shows where the resources are located on the map. From here you can quickly reassign how many citizens are harvesting which resource. Click on wood to drop a citizen into the idle pool, then click on food to draw a citizen from the idle pool. As you progress through the game's 15 epochs, new specialized resources spring up. Early on, you'll harvest tin, then iron, then oil, each appearing in new locations and replacing the old resource as you age up.

The full map also works as a war planner that lets you draw battle plans on the map and then send them to other players. Another display shows you how the map is divided into distinct territories. When you control a territory, you can build more cheaply there, making it easier to build up defensively rather than invading an enemy territory.

A new system of objectives, called "crowns," lets you earn bonuses for accomplishing objectives. For each epoch, there are three crowns: military, economic, and imperial (the latter is awarded for base building, a sort of nod to the strategy known as turtling). If you meet the criteria for that crown, you can choose from a list of bonuses that improve your advantage. A military crown might let you choose whether to take tougher infantry or tanks that hit harder. An economic crown might give you a harvesting bonus for the resource of your choice. You keep this advantage as long as you retain control of the crown.

There are four distinct sides -- Middle Eastern, Western, Far Eastern, and Meso-American -- each with their own units and special powers. These sides are further broken down into 14 specific nationalities with unique tweaks. Mad Doc is moving Empire Earth away from the first game's fantastic spells (plagues, volcanoes, and temporal storms) in favor of more plausible historical abilities. But the sci-fi will still kick in as giant mechs emerge in the later epochs. The single-player game consists of three campaigns: ancient Korea, Medieval Germany, and modern-day America. New multiplayer game types include a "Hotspots" mode in which the winner is the player who controls the most victory locations. A "Capital" mode is simply a matter of taking the other player's home city while defending your own; in team games, you can liberate your ally's captured capitals to bring them back into the fray.

However, Empire Earth 2 is still in the early stages of development and won't be released until first quarter of next year. But with an attractive 3D engine and some promising gameplay innovations, it's already a sequel to watch even if you weren't a fan of the first!